Beatriz Carrasquer

Exergy as a guide to allocate environmental costs for implementing the Water Framework Directive in the Ebro River

Abstract The Physical Hydronomics (PH) methodology is a tool to properly calculate restoration cost of water resources (regarding to quality degradation of water as well as water quantity losses) in the framework of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. It is based on the exergy, a thermodynamic property that can be understood as the minimum energy needed to restore a resource from its reference environment. An opportunity that methodology brings up is the development of River exergy profiles which can be represented along the length of the river, for different periods and degradation statuses. Focusing on the Water Framework Directive milestones, the most relevant contribution which is presented here is the assessment of restoration cost among diverse water polluters from physicochemical parameters of the river. The case study which is developed is the Ebro basin, a very representative Mediterranean river in Spain. Figures shown that quality restoration costs, found in the agriculture user resulted to be the...

A study of the application of the physical hydronomics methodology to assess environmental costs of European rivers

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to check out the status of collected data in European water-related information tools, with the final aim of analyzing the cost to reach the good environmental status in European rivers, from recorded physical and chemical data, within the second law of thermodynamics. Design/methodology/approach – The study is especially focussed in an economical assessment to account for the environmental costs of water bodies according to the Water Framework Directive. The Catchments and Rivers Network System, the most important information tool in Europe nowadays, constitutes the support of this work. This study shows a methodology to estimate the cost to restore water bodies in energy terms with the help of an aggregated indicator, from physical and chemical characteristics of rivers. More over, energy results are converted later into an economic value. This work presents diverse case studies, starting from Garonne, Rhone, Rhine, Danube, Ebro and Seine rivers. Findings – Figures...

Assessment of Water Resources by Exergy Cost

This chapter presents the application of exergy analysis to water bodies focusing the attention on the assessment of the exergy cost. It comprises three different but clearly connected sections: exergy cost of water technologies, exergy value of the hydrological cycle and fundamentals, and application and results of the Physical Hydronomics methodology. The exergy cost is a key parameter to be included in any water analysis regarding exergy efficiency. It measures the goodness of the considered technological process when it is compared with the ideal one and it is used to translate the objective exergy measurements into economic figures. The unit exergy cost of water technologies is introduced both in the analysis of the exergy value of the natural hydrological cycle and in the calculation of water costs. In particular, Physical Hydronomics is defined as the application of the exergy analysis to the assessment of costs of water bodies and it has presented interesting results when considered in the European Water Framework Directive implementation for Spanish and European watersheds. The background and main results of these three mentioned issues are presented along this chapter.